Later that night, Adah sat at the edge of her bed with her scythe laid across her lap. With no opponent to fight and no essence to claim, she’d stowed away the weapon’s blade, leaving the scythe looking more like a simple staff adorned with chains.

  To summon the scythe, she had needed to transform into Twilight Heartbreak. She’d kicked off her heels and unclasped her shawl for comfort’s sake. She’d been tempted to take a photo and call it “Heartbreak’s casual mode” for the fans, but that wasn’t tonight’s priority. Instead, she had questions for the pig sitting upright in her desk chair like he was a human.

  “What do you sense from it?” Adah asked Izzy. “Does it feel like a Cruelty to you, or something else?”

  Izzy shook his head and said, “On my own, I can’t determine in any great detail the properties of its essence. I can only sense that there is a collection of energy within the weapon. I feel the same sensation when observing a Cruelty or even you.”

  “Could a Magedar tell us more?”

  “It is possible,” Izzy said. “But what is it that you’re hoping to learn?”

  After Rika had closed the portal earlier that day, the rapid heartbeat within the scythe soon faded. The weapon felt normal to Adah after that. She had even tried calling upon its aggressive power—not to unleash it, but to feel its heartbeat again. The pulsing maintained its usual rate even through that, so the frantic beating from earlier must have been a direct but temporary effect from coming in contact with the portal.

  Now Adah wanted to understand why the scythe had reacted that way. Her own theories could only take her so far, but this was a chance to learn more about what existed on the other side of these rifts. Her scythe’s blade had served the same function as an exploratory rover for some far-off planet—she just needed to figure out how to decipher the “sample” it had collected.

  “Whatever I can,” Adah said. “Does the essence inside this thing retain the signature of whatever I collected it from, or does it get processed in some way? Can the Magedars even distinguish between a magic user and a Cruelty in the first place? They must be able to, right? There’s so much that I should know that I just don’t. Isn’t it crazy? We’re supposed to go out and fight these monsters, but we don’t even really understand how the government is detecting them. We’re just supposed to trust that they’ve got it all figured out!”

  She had ended up ranting at Izzy, though none of this was his fault. She was on edge—not only from the erratic heartbeat in her scythe, but also how the regional governments were responding to this development with the portals.

  Adah had contacted Secretary Thibault after the mission to report how she had encountered a Cruelty that could generate portals all on its own. He had given her some kind of curt reply, which she found both odd and annoying, so she had pressed him for more information. Was the government aware Cruelties with this capability existed? Had any spawned anywhere else in the world?

  Thibault had confirmed that he and the other Secretaries of Magic were aware of such variants, but beyond that only reiterated that the true purpose of the portals was to remain a secret. Apparently the other Cruelties of this type had also behaved as passively as the bat, and no humanoids had breached this world. That made sense—most other teams would have destroyed the Cruelty and its portals without a second thought. It was only because Adah knew the truth that she had chosen to investigate.

  Adah only had one other question for Thibault: why hadn’t he told her about these variants before, like he had shared data on the portals that spawned independently?

  “That wasn’t part of our agreement,” he had said in a dull voice, then hung up the phone.

  At least she had confirmed Ekki was right about her pissing off Thibault. She had no plans to apologize, though.

  He had pissed her off, too. Adah was learning more everyday about how this government loved its secrets. Withholding information was a way for them to exert power over the magic users. Thibault had clued DreamRise into his plans for the IndieMagie while leaving Adah and her teammates to be blindsided by the realization that they were nothing but a stepping stool. At the same time, the Secretaries across every region were equally happy to hide the truth when they felt it could cause trouble for them.

  They had one vault for the secrets that gave them power and another for those that would rip power away from them. And someone like Adah wasn’t allowed to see inside either.

  “Be that as it may,” Izzy said to her now, “the situation is not unique to you. It is not even unique to humanity. It is not as though I have a thorough understanding of the detection system myself. Only certain members of my kind were involved in its creation, just as only certain humans were. Our races are not so different in our social structures. In that way, you and I are both but worker bees.”

  Adah looked around her room. She looked over the map of Letria, with yet another pin added to represent the bat Cruelty. She looked over her small whiteboard, cramped with her and Rika’s timeline and an infestation of scribbled notes about the rest of her teammates. She looked all around at the posters of Pureheart that remained on her walls, the heroine still larger than life in Adah’s eyes. Then, she looked down at the scythe in her lap, warm to the touch as it always was.

  She thought about Ketzia, and the old methods of promoting a singular star she had spoken about. Ketzia had been propped up by her agency, presumably so that she could rise to the top and achieve whatever she wanted. Where had that gotten her? She had wound up alone for a time, and only found teammates that could also be her friends once she rejected that old method of promotion. In the end, this industry chewed up those same friends and left Ketzia alone once again.

  What had her response been? To demand she be made Untethered. To detach herself from this industry and its rules, its assumptions, and its contradictions.

  Ketzia could have done more to stop Adah and her teammates from following her to that humanoid Cruelty. She surely had the magical power and physical prowess to knock them on their asses if they tried to leave the cabin. If she and Lesh had asked, Izzy and the rest of the mascots probably would have agreed to keep the girls from transforming. Yet, Ketzia had let them follow her. She had said she was in a rush. Maybe that was true, or maybe it was an excuse she made for herself. Maybe she had let it happen because she knew what it was like to be told so little about the enemy you risked your life to fight.

  Maybe she had decided she knew better than any Secretary what Adah and her teammates deserved to discover.

  “No, Izzy,” Adah said at last. “You’re very wrong about that. You and I aren’t worker bees. At least, we won’t be for long. I’m serious about becoming the strongest out of everyone, which by proxy means you’ll be the strongest as well. And who ever heard of the strongest person in the world listening to someone else’s orders?”

  “What exactly are you implying?” Izzy asked.

  “It’s basically the definition of the word, you know?” she said. “A princess is destined to become a queen.”

  ☆☆☆

  “I think that’s everything,” Seb said as he collapsed back onto Adah’s bed.

  Adah squinted at him and considered dragging him off her bed by his legs, but decided against it. He had worked too hard for her and Rika over the past few days to bully him now. He deserved to relax a little. Besides, she knew he hadn’t fallen for Heartbreak but rather another member of the Last Light.

  “Enjoy that,” she said to him. “It’s the last time you’ll get to lay down in a princess’s bed.”

  “I didn’t even realize it was the first,” he said with a yawn. “It feels more like I’m hanging out in my older sister’s room.”

  Maybe she could bully him a little. She grabbed a pair of balled up socks from the floor and chucked them at his head. They bounced off his cheek—a direct hit.

  “Gross,” he said, but he didn’t bother to move. “You’ve got me confused with a different piglet.”

  “They’re clean! Scum!” Adah shouted back.

  So much for letting him relax. Though, he seemed so tired that none of Adah’s attacks—verbal or otherwise—could faze him.

  The aftermath of her mission with the bat Cruelty, combined with Ekki’s phone call the other day, had left Adah entirely unable to sit still. She had started to feel like even sleeping was wasting precious time that she could have spent working. The timeline she had charted out on her whiteboard seemed too slow. She wanted to measure their progress in hours, not days or weeks.

  Adah passed that sense of urgency along to Rika and Seb by recruiting them for a 48-hour marathon of filming, broken up only by a brief respite of sleep in the middle. She and Rika took a couple more missions during that time, which filled out the remainder of their combat footage. When they weren’t on a job, they were scouting locations around the region that could make for cinematic backgrounds that suited the theme of the rest of the video.

  The song Rika had written had softer verses between its intense choruses, and Adah planned to fill the corresponding sections of their video with scenes that told the story of a blossoming relationship between Heartbreak and Lyrika. In the context of their characters, it was a corrupting relationship, but romantic in its own way. They needed scenes that could show Lyrika luring Heartbreak in, only to find herself the one smitten.

  Those scenes ended up being the most difficult to film. In a battle, she and Rika would try their best to look cool, but whatever footage Seb captured was ultimately what they would have to use. They could only do so much to stage a scene within a real fight. For the interlude scenes, Seb went full director mode. He forced the girls to reshoot and reshoot until he was satisfied with how the footage turned out. Adah tried to apply everything she’d learned from the IndieMagie photoshoot, but Seb was a picky artist. She found herself more tired out from filming his reshoots than from fighting Cruelties.

  At the end of those two days, however, they had captured a collection of footage that Seb called “a masterpiece waiting to be put together.” Unfortunately, there was one last step before they could hand the files off to Seb’s editor friend.

  Particularly for the battle scenes, Seb had left his camera rolling. No matter how much of a genius this editor was or how fast he could work, Seb needed to at least mark the footage for him before sharing the raw files, or the back-and-forth on edits would drag this project out forever. Seb had done some sorting and labeling ahead of time, but hours of footage still remained to scrub through and grade the takes.

  So, Seb had brought his laptop to the agency office for one final all-nighter. For the most part, Seb handled the work alone, but Adah and Rika would provide their thoughts on which combat scenes best represented their styles. Otherwise, they stuck around for moral support, or to bring new snacks to Adah’s room to fuel the process.

  Rika had tapped out a couple of hours ago, around two in the morning, and went to pass out in the quiet of her own room while Adah and Seb finished up. Now, not long before the sun would rise, Seb had finally sent the files off to the editor.

  “Now what?” Adah asked.

  “Now we sleep, and he works,” Seb said. “And maybe by the time we wake up, he’ll already have finished our masterpiece.”

  And Adah knew exactly what she was going to do at that point.

  “Perfect,” she said with a grin. “But you aren’t sleeping in this room. I know of a couch with your name on it.”